George Pyle: Other newspapers get to honor senators they admire.

While we wait for the already much-acclaimed movie “The Post” to find its way here, a locally, and freshly, relevant story about one of its lead characters:

Before he was editor of The Washington Post, Ben Bradlee reported for Newsweek. Bill Moyers, then the press secretary to President Lyndon Johnson, whispered to Bradlee that Johnson had decided to fire J. Edgar Hoover, the only director the FBI had ever had.

This was huge. Hoover was widely seen as irreplaceable. Not so much because he was respected or loved, but because he was feared. He had something on everyone.

Bradlee went with the story. He scooped everyone in town. Or would have, except Johnson threw a presidential snit fit about the news getting out before he was ready to announce it.

The president called in the press, denied the story and further announced that Hoover was going to be boss of the FBI “for life.” Which was the opposite of what Johnson had planned and which he knew was a very bad idea. All just to make Bradlee into a liar.

As Bradlee later told the story, Johnson finished the briefing, leaned over to Moyers and said, “You can tell Ben Bradlee to go f--- himself.”

That, minus the expletive, was what I fully expected to hear from Orrin Hatch sometime in the last few days.

Christmas Day was not the first time The Salt Lake Tribune expressed its editorial opinion that Hatch should not seek an eighth term in the U.S. Senate. But it was the first time the newspaper had also named Hatch its Utahn of the Year. And simultaneously felt the need to explain in an editorial that being the biggest newsmaker of 2017 did not make him exemplary or honorable.

So I was prepared for the announcement that Hatch was going to stay in the Senate for life, if for no other reason than to let The Tribune know he didn’t care what we thought.

When Hatch announced that, indeed, he was not going to run again, my desk received notes from all over crediting our editorial for being the jawbone of an ass that finally slew the mighty senator.

I’m not having any of it. People that important don’t make decisions that big based on what a newspaper editorial board thinks. At least, not only on what it thinks. There were polls suggesting Hatch might actually have a fight on his hands. His health, at 83, is not what it was and, reports are, his wife and family wanted him to be theirs again.

Before all this is forgotten in the crush of elephants — and donkeys — seeking to replace him, one more less-than-complimentary observation.

Among the other senators leaving this year are Jeff Flake — named, along with John McCain, the Arizonan of the Year by the Arizona Republic — and Bob Corker, the Nashville Tennessean newspaper’s 2017 Person of the Year. Both were chosen for having the guts to stand up to some of the worst of national politics and praised for lacking the stomach to stick around and kowtow to the personification of that worst — Donald Trump.

So the editors of those newspapers got to pick for their annual honors people they were actually proud of. Lucky skunks.

Instead of leaving the Senate in a puff of praise for its Republican leaders and in the wake of his thoroughly embarrassing worship of Trump, Hatch could have joined Flake and Corker in telling us all that he had had his fill of the place, and of the White House, and wanted no further part of the degradation of either.

In 1938, when Hatch was 4 years old, a gangster movie called “Angels With Dirty Faces” came out. James Cagney was a big-time gangster, about to go to the chair for murder. He was visited by a priest, a boyhood friend from the old neighborhood, played, of course, by Pat O’Brien.

It was the priest who asked the gangster for a favor. Not for himself, but for the young men and boys in their old neighborhood who looked up to the high-living mobsters as heroes. Could the tough guy, asked the priest, not go to his death defiant and proud, a martyr to be emulated, but go kicking and screaming and crying and begging, a shameful coward that nobody would want to have as a role model.

And that’s just what the gangster did. Kick and scream and cry and beg. And the priest never knew, of course, whether that was the way he really felt, or an act he put on as a last gesture to an old friend, to his old neighborhood.

One thing we do know. Orrin Hatch is no James Cagney.

George Pyle, The Tribune’s editorial page editor, is happy to claim credit for a year with no commercial aviation fatalities, no Martian invasions and no Pokemon stampedes on State Street. gpyle@sltrib.com